


Somewhere To Begin

by Rrrowr



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 05:06:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rrrowr/pseuds/Rrrowr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The PASIV device is a reality shifter. It’s not risk-free technology, and sometimes, things go wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere To Begin

The PASIV device is installed into the wall — a square of silver with a backlit touch screen through which Jumpers can interact with the PASIV’s program — and the wires stretch out from its core, across the floor to the narrow beds with bars on either side and restraints. The very sight of it is enough to inspire fear. There’s nothing horrifying about it per se, Arthur knows, but the very recent knowledge that any trip made with the PASIV device could well be one’s last is enough to make any man or woman hesitant about hooking up. It’s that knowledge, instead of the usual need for reconnaissance, that has spurred this particular mission forward. 

It’s a search and rescue.

“After you,” says Eames, who has appeared at Arthur’s elbow.

Arthur sneers a little, helpless to the edge of anger with which the sight of Eames has nearly always left him recently. Eames is not one of Arthur’s favorite people at the moment. Every time Arthur sees him, he’s reminded of the differences between this Eames and the original — the one that should be here — and he picks at them mentally. Every deviation from the usual sets Arthur’s teeth on edge. 

This Eames regards the PASIV as a tool, without fear or respect, and he uses it relentlessly, day after day — hour after hour — in a manner most unlike the other Jumpers. Arthur suspects that Eames is a bit pitiable because of it. There’s nothing to tie the other man here after all, not with the situation they’ve found themselves in, but Eames has never seemed to want for it. In fact, his regard of other Jumpers — especially their caution with the PASIV — is no less than derogatory. It’s enough to wipe any trace of pity from Arthur’s senses.

“You’re the one leading the way,” Arthur snaps at Eames and gestures toward the bed that’s closest to the other man. 

Eames rumbles low in his throat. The sound is vaguely threatening, but in the last few months, Arthur has heard it so frequently in response to something he’s said that he’s figured it means that Eames has found something interesting in his tone. Aloud, however, Eames merely says: “Quite right,” and hops onto the bed to hook himself up.

The way the PASIV device works is remarkably gentle, no matter Arthur’s reservations. It’s always like sinking into a warm pool of water or like falling asleep. It’s smooth and silken and easy every single time. Instinctively, Arthur somehow expects a struggle with entering a different universe — like it should be more difficult — but it never is.

He feels it happen though. It’s like when he runs his hands over a wall — over wood panelling or wallpaper — and it’s smooth, smooth, smooth until he encounters a bubble (a bulging, a discontinuity, a disconnect). It slips under his touch and then is gone. The conscious mind of the body Arthur now occupies is buried down deep, oblivious and quiet and still.

Arthur opens his eyes to a mirror — to a face that is not altogether different from his own. This is how it always is, too. The PASIV finds the mind that is most like his, the mind that could well have been his own under different circumstances, and replaces it with Arthur. The hair isn’t always the same. Sometimes the face is scarred. Sometimes there are piercings. Not even the eyes are always the same.

Here, Arthur stands at a washing basin and there’s shaving cream across half his face, with the rest of his jaw freshly shaven. No scars this time nor any piercings. Just the same dark eyes and dark hair that Arthur would recognize on himself. Turning his face this way and that, Arthur looks for differences. He finds exactly two: the sliver of a scar under his hairline is gone and when he opens his jaw, there isn’t a disconcerting pop.

This world is very close, he decides.

Parallel universes, for all that the name might imply, does not mean that they’re at all similar to the original. There are anomalies and bizarre differences. Worlds where currency is chocolate or gold coin. Worlds where mankind lives in trees. Worlds where animals talk. Worlds where people have spirit companions or magical powers. With all that, Arthur never hopes to recognize anything he might encounter and is glad for his ability to handle a steep learning curve, but there is one constant that he can always expect.

“Are you done primping yet or can we get on with business?”

Eames.

It’s the reason why they worked together. Without fail, Arthur can enter any world — any at all — and find Eames nearby. Their relationship in the alternate world might be friends, lovers, enemies, brothers or even total strangers, but the proximity is always present. Arthur finds it reassuring. The Eames who is looking at him now finds it useful.

“Just give me a moment,” Arthur says, splashing water on his face and patting it dry. Eames paces in the neighboring room while he waits. “Do you know where we are?”

“Everything was programmed correctly into the PASIV device, if that’s what you’re asking,” Eames tells him sharply. Then deliberately so, he seems to soften: “I mean… yes. I know where we are.”

When Arthur finally emerges, free of shaving cream and drier than he was (after having apparently Jumped into this new body after a shower), Eames is standing at a window overlooking the city. He points out different buildings, the parks, the vehicles of importance (law enforcement, emergency, etc) and then turns with a broad gesture that encompasses the whole of the room they’re in.

“Home,” he says with a great heaviness.

Arthur takes it in — the walls of bookshelves and the pictures and the narrow hospital bed along the wall. There’s a meal cooling on the stove and a place setting for one at the dining table. The sheets on the hospital bed seem to be freshly disarrayed and the bedroom, when Arthur peeks into it, seems mostly undisturbed.

“Arthur seems to have had things well in hand,” Eames comments. It’s deceptively mild, the way he says it, but Arthur watches him touch his fingers across the edge of the hospital bed and then at the corner of the dining table. 

Eames doesn’t say that the Arthur that occupies this universe must have been lonely. He doesn’t say that, while Arthur might have opened his eyes to a reflection of himself, Eames woke to a plaster ceiling and an IV in his arm. He doesn’t have to say that the Arthur of this universe has been sleeping on the couch near the hospital bed — that he must have because there’s a coffee cup that’s gone cold on the table and because a throw and pillow from the bed are now on the couch. 

There’s no need to say it. Arthur can tell for himself. Except for the hospital bed, the apartment looks eerily similar to his own.

“Let’s get a move on then,” Arthur cuts in. “Do you know where they might be keeping him?”

Tapping his forehead, Eames says: “He’s in here, just fine, but we’ll need access to a PASIV and the right program, of course.”

Getting access is tricky — not to the PASIV, but to the program. The first time their two universes had connected, it had been through chance — a random dialing of the PASIV’s core system, FISCHER — and drawing it out of a month’s worth of backlog takes time. FISCHER is mostly cooperative in finding all the old missions that had encountered errors, though it seems to disagree with Arthur about going through with the hook up again.

That’s the problem with artificial intelligence, Arthur thinks fiercely as he puts in some code that will help FISCHER toward the right idea. It’s always trying to make its own decisions when really it should know better.

When everything settles into place — the right program, the right PASIV — the frustration melts of out Arthur. It takes a moment before he can take his hands from the PASIV’s touch screen and look at Eames.

“This will work, right?” he asks.

Unhelpfully, Eames shrugs. “I hope it will.”

“I’ll delete this universe from the records when I get back,” Arthur promises, rather uselessly.

“Yes, well,” Eames replies. “We’re a little too close for comfort, I think.”

It’s a double entendre, the words. He means the universes and he means the two of them. Arthur knows this, but Eames will never let on that he recognizes Arthur’s knowledge.

Before he hands over the IV, Arthur says: “You might consider telling him your name. It’s the least you can do after the few months he’s had, taking care of you.”

Eames grunts and takes the IV. “Maybe.”

They don’t say good-bye or even so much as a see you later. Either would be too tender or a lie. Arthur spends the rest of the hour waiting for the sedation in his universe to run out and watching Eames’ face, settled in a mockery of slumber. When at last he wakes — in his home universe, to the hard cushions of the bed he’d been on — he turns to look to his right. It’s Eames’ face looking back at him — impassive and cautious in the few moments before it breaks into a soft smile.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave me behind for long.”

Arthur reaches over. “Welcome home, Daniel.”

—

—

Terror is not something Arthur is used to. He knows that at one moment he had been walking down the street, jacket in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, and the next, he’s standing in the living room of his apartment with his cell phone distantly ringing in his pocket. This must be what people in neighboring universes feel like after a Jumper has come through: disoriented and out of sorts.

Back to the terror, though.

He answers his phone. It’s the department head of PASIV Investigations. He sounds apologetic and concerned; that’s Arthur’s first clue. He says: “I’m afraid we have some bad news. There’s been an accident.” He mentions a glitch in FISCHER’s system and the jolt of energy caused by some unknown interference. He says Eames’ name — just the last name and the only one Arthur has ever known him by — and that’s when the terror sets in.

“Is he okay?” he asks and is met with silence. “Has been taken to the hospital?”

Yes, yes — of course he has, but when Arthur gets there, the doctors tell him that there’s nothing to be done. Eames is in a coma — neither brain dead nor reactive to his environment — and eventually, the doctors agree to a set up in his apartment. Maybe familiar surroundings will encourage his health, they say, but Arthur thinks they’re just trying to give him some hope. He appreciates it, but he can’t begin to make them understand that he just wants Eames where he can keep an eye on him.

Arthur finds that he can’t sleep in the bedroom. He can’t hear Eames breathing from there, can’t see the monitor tracing out his vitals in steady patterns, and can’t watch through the night to see if Eames even twitches. He ends up sleeping a few cold nights on the couch before he finally succumbs and drags a blanket to the couch to sleep under. He takes his morning coffee at Eames’ bedside and cooks at home instead of going for take out. He wishes that he could do more than hook Eames up to intravenous meals and more often, he wishes that the nurse that comes by to help with sponge baths would just leave well enough alone. He doesn’t need her pitying looks; he just needs Eames to wake up already.

“You always were a pain to look after,” Arthur says to Eames’ entirely unresponsive form. “But don’t you think this is taking things a bit far?”

They’d always been together — had always thrown in their lot at the same time, worked the same missions, held the same aspirations — but now that it’s just Arthur doing these things and coming back to a quiet, if not empty home, he wonders if they’ve been taking it for granted. He misses it desperately, he realizes. It’s not sudden; the hard knot of discomfort in his chest is recognizable, but now that the feeling has been named — longing — it claws at his mind with a hunger that is surprising.

Dinner alone. Breakfast alone. Sleeping alone. Working alone. Every moment — whether awake or not — has an emptiness to it that Eames could fill. There are silences that his conversation could take up. There are so many ways in which Eames had been there, snarking and savage and fiercely intelligent, that to have him absent is like a wound, gaping and painful and unhealing.

“You should really wake up,” Arthur tells Eames plainly, bent at Eames’ bedside, forehead pressed to the other man’s very still hands. “I miss you.” 

As much as he means them, the words don’t quite ring true.

“I need you.”

Also true — but not enough.

“I love you.”

Still, Eames is not awake.

Arthur waits for weeks — each one more endless than the last. He has the odd idea that maybe he should make something he knows Eames would have liked to eat, so he does and leaves it to cool while he showers. It happens while he’s in the middle of shaving off the day’s stubble — that disorienting smothering from a month ago — and he’s helpless to stop it. When he wakes again, it’s to the walls of PASIV Investigations, to the glowing screen and FISCHER’s holographic pseudo-human depiction. 

“Cycle complete,” intones FISCHER’s deep voice. There’s the whir and click of the program coming to an end and then a groan to Arthur’s right. “Please exit the PASIV pod safely and watch your step.”

“God, I hope this worked.”

Arthur feels that terror again, but he must look. He can’t not look when he hears Eames speak. He can’t deny the sheer, unadulterated joy he feels when he sees Eames tugging the IV from his wrist — moving and speaking and looking back at Arthur with this strange look on his face.

“You’re awake,” Arthur says and is completely unable to explain the way his voice cracks around the words.

Eames steps from the PASIV pod carefully. (Off to the side, FISCHER closes its eyes and flickers to nothing.) “Arthur,” he whispers. He clears his throat and takes a step closer. “Well,” he says, “aren’t you going to welcome me back properly?”

It might not have been the greeting Eames had been expecting and the enthusiasm might have been a bit more than he had been prepared for, but when Arthur wraps his arms around Eames’ neck and kisses him soundly, he’s met with equal fervor. 

“You’re never allowed on missions without me again,” hisses Arthur when they part. “Understand?”

“Completely,” Eames replies before kissing him again.


End file.
